Telkom Business launches AI transcription service for small businesses

Telkom executive for data science, Stefan Steffen | image supplied

Through izwe.ai businesses can engage directly with multilingual transcription and translation services. The platform allows SMEs to eliminate manual work by automatically transcribing and translating important information into text.

Telkom executive: data science Stefan Steffen says: “Every business needs digital tools to remain competitive and you cannot think about digital without mentioning AI. Through this platform, the aim is to enable several different speech-related services. Currently, we are making available transcription and translation services, but we are also developing more refined services that are more technical as it relates to entity extraction, sentiment analysis and other value-added services.”

Humans-in-the-Loop

As part of izwe.ai, Telkom Business has partnered with Cape Town-based data labelling startup Enlabeler to provide Humans-in-the-Loop, a service that allows customers to access translation and transcription services in the various South African languages.

Enlabeler has a network of digital linguists who are connected to the platform to help provide customers with translations and transcriptions. If a business wants higher accuracy than what the machine transcription service can provide, they can select the Humans-in-the Loop service on the izwe.ai website. Businesses need to upload data on the platform, and it is distributed to the digital workforce that will then provide human transcription.

“The first machine transcription model that we are deploying is our English model. This focuses on transcribing the various South African accents. Telkom Business plans to introduce isiZulu, Afrikaans, Tshivenda, Xitsonga and Sesotho transcription models in the future.”

“The translation service is supported by a network of linguists. In that way, we can find linguists that can cater to each customer’s needs. For now, the translation service is included within the Humans-in-the-Loop component. Businesses can upload their documents on the platform that are then translated to the preferred language including the mentioned South African languages as well as Portuguese, Kiswahili, and Dutch.”